Challenge 1: Birmingham City Council
Increase Birmingham City Council’s capacity to be a good corporate parent by attracting more foster and adoptive carers; creating more opportunities for safeguarding the future of Birmingham’s 2000 looked after children.
Challenge 2: Hertfordshire County Council and St Albans City and District Council
Herts CC are responsible for the support provided in the hostels and for floating support provided to service users when they move into lower support/independent living. St Albans & District Council are responsible for housing vulnerable adults. We both share responsibility for ensuring that residents’ needs are met and their independence is promoted. Teams were asked to produce a report proposing a plan to improve the proportion of individuals moving on from Hostels to the private sector at the time they are ready to do so.
Challenge 3: Thurrock Council
Teams were tasked with developing plan that set out how the council and its partners can excite and motivate local young people about emerging job opportunities from a regeneration programme, and prepare them with the skills and qualifications to access the managerial jobs and other opportunities.
Challenge 4: South Cambridgeshire District Council
In December 2012 the Council would be opening a brand new contact centre on-site and managed in-house. By embracing modern technology and new ways of working the new contact centre aimed to deliver significant cost savings whilst offering an increased range of access channels. The challenge for the team was to create an innovative Channel Shift strategy, outlining high-level vision and approach and be specific to South Cambridgeshire and its customer profile, ensuring the Council continued to meet its responsibilities to customers with higher levels of need.
Challenge 5: Kirkless Council
A challenge with Kirklees Council, Natural England and the Forestry Commission. The Council were in the process of turning an old landfill site into a country park to offer local residents a range of opportunities that would improve their health and wellbeing – but funding was tight. The challenge for the teams was to come up with a series of innovative but practical measures to provide new revenue streams and to reduce the cost of running the park
The Final
Local Government Challenge 2012 winner - Hannah Rees
Congratulations to Hannah Rees, Communications Manager at Cornwall Council, our 2012 LG Challenge winner.
Since winning the Local Government Challenge in 2012, Hannah's work has centred on developing ‘Shaped by Us.' This is a digital communications platform that enables local people to connect with organisations that can help them find solutions to challenges and shape the future of their local area themselves.
How winning the 2012 challenge changed Hannah's career path
Winning the LG Challenge has changed my career path and broadened my horizons in a way I didn't realise it would. I suppose I am very lucky that my authority have been so supportive – they decided that if an opportunity to develop me as a leader was going to come then they'd give me that opportunity at full throttle.
My original pitch to the LG Challenge panel was around supporting a project that Cornwall Council had been working on for some time. The Nesta Creative Councils programme seeks to harness innovation in local government to find better ways of doing what we've always done, more efficiently and for less money. Cornwall Council was successful in its bid to the Creative Councils programme and won £150k to develop the idea – an interactive online platform called: Shaped By Us
It is to help citizens come up with ideas for shaping and creating better services with the public sector. I loved the project and what it stood for and pledged to work out how we communicate the tool to help it become part of the fabric of how we work with our local communities and to share this knowledge so that other councils could use the tool to do the same.
Winning the challenge changed all that. My management team decided that I should learn by doing and so I became the project owner. This catapulted me into lots of different areas that I had very little experience of – contract management, grant agreements, being accountable to a national body, financial management, legal, policy and localism. It's also given me experience of working with Nesta and the Innovation Unit on successfully delivering transformational change. There are similarities to the LG Challenge, in that the six successful Creative Councils work together in Creative Camps as a cohort, working on progressing our projects using innovation methods and toolkits. The work itself is interesting, challenging and useful, but also the conversations around what each other's councils do, how they work and what challenges they face in the current climate are just as interesting and informative.
I'm about to go to Denmark to visit MindLab, an innovative government organisation that works with communities to co-design services that work for them. There are obviously similarities with what we are trying to do here in Cornwall – and beyond – so it will be great to use their tried and tested experiences from the past few years and bring them back to the project here.
The USA has been a tougher nut to crack, but through Creative Councils I've made some great contacts that have led me to San Francisco and some amazing work going on there:
I'll be pitching up there soon to find out how digital public services are helping shape government across the whole of the USA – but also how private sector companies such as Google and Apple engage with their customers too.
So what do I make of the experience so far? Well, I've grabbed the opportunity with both hands, and although at times it's been tough, I have to say that having to learn quickly and make it work has been a great experience. Being involved in this kind of project that really feels like it could make a huge impact, not just in Cornwall, but across the UK is fantastic, so I'm really happy that the LG Challenge lead me here – and beyond!
Hannah will be using the £10,000 Bruce Lockhart scholarship prize to improve citizen engagement through the use of online channels.